The Terrorizing Appendix

    On November 5th 2009 Major Nadal Malik Hasan shot dead 13 people and injured many more at Fort Hood, in Texas. In light of this recent tragedy, I want to know: why do people go on rampages? To examine this, I will look into a few cases  (school shootings mostly) in which people, seemingly inexplicably, went on killing sprees. Why do they happen? What different explanations exist for these rampages? After I have examined past cases, paying special attention to the Columbine shootings, I will return to this recent case, of Maj. Hasan, and attempt to analyze it based on my findings.

 As an avid horror film fan, I have watched my fair share of zombie movies. The first I ever watched was the 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s classic, “Dawn of the Dead.” The movie scared me on so many levels – I was thirteen years old, afraid of the dark and virtually everything else in the world – not to mention the thought of bloodthirsty, cannibalistic zombies taking over the world. My adverse reaction to zombies evolved over the years, however, and my fear turned into sheer curiosity. Even though I understood that by no means are zombies real, I often wondered why the zombies of the movies were sometimes slow, sometimes fast, sometimes stupid, and sometimes pretty smart. More than that, I wondered from where George A.

            Without a doubt, everyone knows of someone who needed to have his or her appendix removed. Certainly, this begs the question, “What does the appendix do?” Although some people might seem as though they have had their brain removed, that is not a realistic procedure; nor can one have his or her heart removed. Many organs can be transplanted, to be sure, but why do we human beings have an organ that we can simply do without? Plenty of organs can be removed without fatal consequences, but there are almost always consequences. Yet this is not the case with the appendix.

Senior Seminar in Biology and Society
November 10, 2009
Julia Lewis

Love: A Narcotic High?

Figure 1          

The Art of Changing the Brain by James Zull has been my "brain bible" (so to speak) this year. I keep it with me all the time to help me design strategies. Zull discusses the Neural Networks that our students develop and biologically keep all their lives so therefore teachers can't erase background knowledge. A possible tactic is to find out what they are thinking and how they explain a particular phenomenon and then help them make critical new connections.